Geni.com is ALL over the internet as of late in blog posts, pr releases and articles so I wanted to take a moment to give my “take” on the program.
Geni.com claims that its site’s largest family tree now includes over 600,00 people built by over 40,000 users. Geni’s web site offers Web 2.0-style tools to draw a family tree and link up family members, with a focus on social networking.
So, heres my take:
The good, social networking is wonderful.. I love it and I use it to get my message out. This is a really fun way to contact family members from far away to have input on your family tree. Kudo’s to former PayPal founder David Sacks. Not only that it does give you a way to use social networking to perhaps locate living family that may also be researching the “family tree” that you never knew about. This makes it great if you do run into someone in your tree to combine research.
The bad, in my personal experience most of my family tree that I am searching on aren’t alive which makes it kind of hard to get an email to them to participate and the ones that are well, I might put them in my tree, but I certainly don’t ever want to compromise their identity. I am not saying that Geni.com does that in any way with their program but it just seems like a bit too much personal information to have on the net, if you know what I mean.
The other thing that is missing for me personally is that if you have a large family tree and DID want to use this, there is no way to upload a gedcom or other type of file. (If there is I cant find it for the life of me.) You can download one if you create your tree there.. but with over 18000 people in my tree it would be a massive amount of work just to get it on the site.
I guess it depends on what you are trying to do… get in touch with long lost perhaps living relatives, or build the past where you may have quite a bit of missing information there. This program will be a good fit for some hobby genealogists, people just getting started without software perhaps, and young people exploring what genealogy is all about.
IMHO
Candace,
First I would like to thank you for featuring Geni in this wonderful Blog Post. Second, we understand user feedback is an indispensable part of why Geni is so successful. With that said, I just wanted to clarify a couple of points. We do allow both GEDCOM Import and Export. Our GEDCOM Import limit is currently capped at 15,000 individuals, but that will soon be lifted. Second, user privacy and security is our #1 priority. By default, your family tree is private; only people invited into the family tree can access the family tree.
Once again, we would like to thank you for featuring Geni in this post. If you ever have any additional questions or feedback feel free to send us an email directly or participate in our forum:
forum.geni.com
Thank you,
-Keith-
The Geni Team